Reviewing the Justices’ Agreement Rates in Civil Cases, 1990-1995

By Kirk Jenkins on February 22, 2019POSTED IN DATA ANALYTICS, VOTING AGREEMENT RATES

For the past few weeks, we’ve been reviewing the data on how often each of the Justices voted with the majority in non-unanimous civil and criminal cases.  For the next three weeks, we’ll be reviewing a related statistic – how often did each Justice agree with each of his or her individual colleagues on the Court?  Today, we’ll begin a three-week trip through the Court’s recent history on the civil side, then we’ll look at the criminal side.

But first, a few ground rules.  In order to smooth out random variations from year to year, we’ll group the twenty-nine-year period by looking at six years at a time – thus better seeing real relationships and trends.  Second, just as with the last series of posts, “agreement” means complete agreement – a Justice who votes to affirm and another who votes to affirm in part and reverse in part are not counted as agreeing in this data.  Third, because the Court’s unanimity rate is typically so high, we’re addressing non-unanimous decisions only (otherwise, most of these combinations would be clustered relatively high on the bar charts).  Fourth, in the data below, we address every possible combination of Justices who voted in even a single case during these years.

Between 1990 and 1995, Justices Arabian and Baxter had an agreement rate of 83.21%.  Justices Arabian and Eagleson had an agreement rate of 78.57%.  Justices Arabian and Baxter each had an agreement rate with the various pro tem Justices of 66.67%.  Justice Broussard had an agreement rate with Justices Kaufman and Mosk in the fifties – 50% and 56.41%.  Four combinations of Justices had agreement rates in the forties – Justices Arabian and Mosk (42.86%), Justices Baxter and Mosk (45.8%), Justices Broussard and Arabian (45.16%) and Justices Broussard and Eagleson (45.45%).  Justice Broussard had an agreement rate with the pro tems of 36.36%, and Justices Broussard and Baxter (21.43%) and Justice Eagleson and Mosk (27.27%) had agreement rates in the twenties.

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